14 Days of Festivity: Day 2

Gingerbread Houses

I have fond memories of making gingerbread houses as a kid.  I remember my mom would let us have a bunch of friends over for a house-making party.  I remember making the houses at school and in Girl Scouts.

But I also remember the time in third grade, when my house kept falling apart, and I cried in frustration, and I had to be removed from the activity and later brought back to finish during some sort of remedial gingerbread house session.

So, I find gingerbread houses both whimsical and frustrating.  Especially frustrating these days is that the gingerbread house ante has been upped. The graham cracker/milk carton creations of my youth are no longer sufficient, as now we're expected to buy one of those kits and actually create a home-baked structure.  It's no wonder every parent I know who's made a gingerbread house describes the experience using words like stressful and never again.

Therefore, I resisted buying the gingerbread house kit when Nathan asked for it.  Just thinking about trying to assemble a gingerbread house made my eye twitch.

And then, a little angel from the local park district swooped down and saved my gingerbread-ambivalent ass.  You could pay to make a gingerbread house, assembled by somebody else, at the park district!

They set the scene just perfectly.  Carols were playing, a big tree sparkled in the corner, and they had hot chocolate and cookies you could decorate to get your creative juices flowing:

There was a pre-assembled house on each table.  Nathan selected this one:

The snowman has just purchased this property.  It's a real fixer-upper.  

Pastry bags of frosting and edible "glue" were provided for us, along with an assortment of candies for decorating. 

Nathan began by decorating the roof with a gumball pattern.  Math lesson!

Here's Nathan mounting the telescope on the gingerbread house.  And that's when he declared it the Gingerbread Planetarium!

I helped him extend the telescope with the help of a coffee stir stick:

Then we made a candy replica of the solar system:

It's not exactly to scale.  We had limited materials to work with.

We needed some ground foliage:

The finished product:

The Gingerbread Planetarium has two snowman employees, shown here.  I like to think one of them represents my grandpa, Papa Jack, who is 90 years old and still runs the planetarium at his local college. 

Now, since getting the house home, we have experienced two gingerbread house-related challenges.  First, where does one display a gingerbread house?  We don't have a lot of free horizontal surfaces on which we can plop a big candy- and frosting-coated monstrosity.  The fireplace mantle isn't quite deep enough.  So right now the house just gets moved around from one surface to another, as needed for convenience. 

Our second problem, which I predicted, is that Nathan doesn't totally understand the idea that the gingerbread house is to look at, not to eat/touch/play with.  Fortunately his four-year-old short attention span seems to be working in our favor, though, because one day later he's kind of lost interest in the thing. 

But we did have a great time making it.